The Anatomy of a Trump Twitter Rant: From Scotland Yard to “Chain Migration”

Donald Trump’s lawyers, among others, can’t be happy about one of his latest tweets.

Photograph by the Asahi Shimbun via Getty

President Donald Trump can be scattershot in his tweets, as seemed to be
the case with the range of subjects he chose in the space of a few hours
on Friday morning: Scotland Yard, “loser terrorists,” ESPN, Barack
Obama, the Internet, “political correctness,” Americans who bring family
members to this country. And yet this stream of invective had coherence,
in that it could be classified as one long, sustained, distinctly
Trumpist cry.

Trump got started after hearing the news of an explosion in London’s
Parsons Green Underground station. “Another attack in London by a loser
terrorist,” he tweeted, at 6:42 A.M., Eastern Time. “These are sick and
demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be
proactive!” Why would his first reaction to a dangerous, unfolding
situation be to seemingly chastise the people on the front lines for not
having been on top of it, or aggressive enough? It’s the same question
that came up when Trump responded to a North Korean nuclear test by
deriding the South Koreans as appeasers. Both the United Kingdom and
South Korea are our allies; both had a right to expect that the American
President’s first expression would be one of sympathy or support—of
respect, one way or the other.

And where was Trump getting his information? Scotland Yard hadn’t
publicly said anything about the perpetrator, much less that the person
or persons had been in its “sights.” Perhaps Trump had learned
something, however preliminary, from American intelligence, and took it
upon himself to announce the information. Maybe he just made an assumption. No option here is
good. The British made that clear, with a statement by the London police
saying that “speculation” was “unhelpful.” Prime Minister Theresa May
echoed that language later, telling the BBC, “I never think it’s helpful
for anybody to speculate on what is an ongoing investigation.”

May’s comments came hours, and many tweets, after Trump’s opening salvo.
Six minutes after his Scotland Yard missive, Trump offered a “tougher”
tactic against “loser terrorists”: “The internet is their main
recruitment tool which we must cut off & use better!” Cut off the
Internet? How, and for whom? Might the Constitution prohibit such
action? The President didn’t seem to have time to linger on such
details, because after another six minutes he tweeted, “The travel ban
into the United States should be far larger, tougher and more
specific-but stupidly, that would not be politically correct!”

How would one make the travel ban—that is, Trump’s executive order
saying that people from six Muslim nations and all refugees should not
be allowed into the United States, which has been partly stayed, thanks
to multiple legal challenges—both larger and more specific? In fact,
during the 2016 campaign, Trump proposed a way: a “complete and total”
ban on Muslims, which he was stopped from pursuing when his lawyers,
among others, told him that it would be unconstitutional (or, as Trump
defines it, politically incorrect). In other words, Trump was just
complaining that he hasn’t been able to keep out as many Muslims as he’d
like, and that, “stupidly,” he has to listen to the lawyers.

Those lawyers cannot be happy about this tweet. They have been arguing,
in various cases, one of which will reach the Supreme Court in the
coming weeks, that the executive order has nothing to do with Trump’s
call for a Muslim ban—indeed, that it has nothing to do with Muslims.
Instead, they portray it as a sensible and tailored response to
conditions specific to the six countries. The problem is that Trump
keeps saying that this reasoning is just a cover for what he still
regards as his ban. (He has also said that, although the current version
of the order is watered down, he’d eventually be able to expand it, if
it gets through the courts.) The President’s past comments on the issue
have made it into the challengers’ briefs and multiple judges’ rulings
against him; this morning’s tweet is another one for the list.

That frustration seems to have triggered another thought on Trump’s
part. Six minutes after the travel-ban tweet came this one: “We have
made more progress in the last nine months against ISIS than the Obama
Administration has made in 8 years. Must be proactive & nasty!” His
assessment is doubtful on many levels; his anxiety that he might be
considered less of a leader than Barack Obama is not. Maybe that
“nasty!” was just another chafe at the constraints, shored up under
Obama, that prevent the United States from engaging in torture. Or maybe
it was about people telling him not to tweet, or both.

The Obama putdown then seemed to bring Trump to someone else he
was mad at: Jemele Hill, an ESPN analyst who said, in Twitter
exchanges with her followers on Monday, that the President was a
“white supremacist,” and also said that he was “ignorant.” Two days
later, Trump’s spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called for Hill’s
firing in a White House briefing. Trump himself, twenty minutes after
his Obama tweet, had this to say: “ESPN is paying a really big price for
its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD
numbers. Apologize for untruth!” The truth that Trump seemed to have
trouble with was that a black woman, who had a forum that men took
seriously, was not being adequately punished for insulting him. Hill has
apologized for getting ESPN mixed up in all this—and the network, after
distancing itself from her remarks, said that it accepted her
apology—but not for the substance of what she said.

Having, perhaps, stewed about this fact for an hour or so, at 9 A.M.Trump posted what was probably be the most worrisome tweet of the
morning: “CHAIN MIGRATION cannot be allowed to be part of any
legislation on Immigration!” “Chain migration” has become the go-to term
for those who worry that the phrase “family reunification”—used to
describe the process by which one legal immigrant can later bring family
members to the United States legally—is not sufficiently ominous. (If
that process sounds like many Americans’ family histories, that’s
because it is.) “Chain migration” is the same idea as “anchor babies,” a
term that was thrown around during the G.O.P. primaries, amplified. And,
like “anchor babies,” it speaks to a body of revisionist, nativist,
pseudo-judicial interpretation that holds, among other things, that the
Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t really guarantee birthright citizenship. (I
wrote about how Trump pushed that
position during the campaign.) It wasn’t clear whether Trump was talking about
jettisoning family preferences for would-be immigrants entirely or just
doing so in a limited way in the context of a deal involving the
Dreamers. In recent days, “chain migration” has been used on Fox News,
among other places, to warn against protecting Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipients: eight hundred thousand of them
now would mean three million more Latino-Americans later. But, if they
came legally, why would that be a problem? The obsession with “chain
migration” exposes the real anti-immigrant antipathy to DACA: it is not
about breaking the rules but about what the next generation of Americans might
look like.

Within a few hours, the White House staff seemed to have reasserted
itself—there was a condolence call to the British—but Trump’s tweets,
and his resentments, remained.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.